Activity Theory - why we should all love it

So I resumed my readings about Activity Theory and had a nice chat with Ian about it. I was glad to read in a chapter of Nardi's Context and Consciousness one more of the main reasons why I am sympathetic to this theory: they way it views people.
(these are extracts from the notes I took when reading the text yesterday that I thought it would be nice to post here, just in case I forget in the future why I like AT so much)

"Another very important very important difference between DC and AT is in how they see the relation between people and artefacts. In AT, artefacts are seen as mediators of activity. The theory perceives humans as carriers of motive and consciousness, which objects and machines aren’t. Therefore people and artefacts can’t be seen as symmetrical or equivalent.

Conversely, DC treats both people and objects as “nodes in a system” and conceive a rather difficult to understand notion of artefacts as ‘cognizing entities’. However, a human can act in an unpredicted, unexpected, self-initiated way, according to social or personal motives. A machine or an object will always act in a foreseen, programmatic way. Therefore, a theory that posits equivalency between humans and machines damps out sources of systemic variation and contradiction that might have important ramifications for a system. So, the AT position would seem to hold greater potential for leading a more responsible technology design in which people are viewed as active beings in control of their tools for creative purposes rather than as automatons whose operations are to be automated away, or nodes whose rights to privacy and dignity are not guaranteed.

About the difference between AT and Situated Action (:44) about the three men that go nature walking: the bird watcher, the meteorologist and the entomologist. If the first two were only videoed, their behaviour would look exactly the same, but their goals are completely different: one looks for clouds, the other for birds. Now, suppose that the bird watcher is on a mission to create a list with all the birds in North America. This we would never learn only from observing these people. That is what AT brings to front: people’s motives. It gives us a vocabulary to talk about the walker’s activities in meaningful subjective terms and gives necessary attention to what a subject brings to a situation.

So if we want a world where technology is a means to an end, is a mediator that serves thinking, critical, active and reactive human beings, who are capable of planing and adapting to the circumstances, instead of just behaving as "nodes in a system", then AT is a good path to follow".

I find it strange the rejection it has in the academic melieu. I find it specially interesting how the lecturers from my course presented it to us with an almost deprecating way. The result, as expected, is that nobody from my course can hear about it and find me a weirdo for finding it interesting.

Apparently there is this guy Dan, who is working as a free lancer for Amberlight, who is interested in a commercial application of AT. I am curious to talk to him about it, specially, what does he think of the time span for an AT application. I am concerned about the time scale I would need in oder to, for example, see the historical changes in an environment. Or is it something that is possible to do at The Newspaper?